Ministry of Justice spending up to £2.9bn on electronic monitoring

Ministry of Justice spending up to £2.9bn on electronic monitoring

Department seeks hardware, software and networking services to monitor offenders under six-year deal

The Ministry of Justice (MoJ) is looking to spend up to £2.9bn on electronic monitoring technology.

The department monitors about 25,000 people electronically at any one time, using the technology to help enforce the curfew of a individual with a community order, court bail order or released on licence.

Some 116,000 people were monitored electronically over 2010-11 a 9% rise year on year.

With an expected increase in monitoring levels this year, the MoJ has put out a tender for related software, hardware and services. The deal, valued at between £583m and £2.9bn, is to last six years with an option to extend for a further three, according to a notice in the Official Journal of the European Union.

The deal is divided into four lots: the first is for the provision of a national electronic monitoring service in England and Wales, including the processing centre, related hardware and software and deployment of field operatives. The supplier for lot one will act as the systems integrator for the other three lots.

Lot two includes monitoring and mapping software applications; lot three involves hardware such as ankle bracelets and handheld devices capable of monitoring a subject's curfew and which areas they are excluded from; and lot four covers the provision of mobile data and voice used by the monitoring service.

The MoJ says in the notice that it may in future decide to use the PSN connectivity and services frameworks to award lot four. The frameworks are expected to be released in the coming months .